A counfounder here is that a strong accent is correlated with outsourcing customer support to low-cost providers to companies with far-away, underpaid staff who lack cultural context and social power within the company they nominally work for.

Personally, I think the much bigger problem is the shitty outsourcing. But semi-sensical corporatese excuse-making is definitely not improved by language and accent barriers.

Thanks for expressing what I was trying to figure out how to put into words. I feel no animosity towards the folks stuffed in a call center for crap wages. I'm irritated with the company that outsourced their support to India and pays them crap wages to try to navigate technology that they don't have adequate training for and at least have no real power to fix.

I mean I had a fun conversation with an older lady who was living in my birth state. This made a MUCH better experience than having a purely technical call.

Wouldn’t a fluent or native-level speaker be sufficient?

How do you function in a remote first world, where most of your team joins calls over Slack or Teams? It’s weird that someone painstakingly learnt English, but you don’t can’t put in the effort to listen and understand.

It’s a bit of a stretch to say someone who speaks with a thick accent in grammatically questionable English has “learnt” English. One can respect the effort while at the same time being incredibly frustrated with having to carry an additional cognitive load when attempting to communicate with someone ill-equipped to do so. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.